Here's the problem with Wild Growth, GC. You've mentioned that WG is supposed to give Druids a tool to use in small groups (5 or 10 man) where there is no AoE healer present. However, as any hot does, it becomes massively better the more targets you can keep it rolling on. WG is phenomenally good in 25-man raids that are taking consistent damage, but middle of the road in 10-mans and 5-mans. This doesn't quite seem to be what was intended.

CoH is extremely strong right now. No serious priest can really deny that. However, remember, at 70 we're dealing with nerfed encounters largely designed for the raid to be close together and taking large amounts of AoE damage. So really it's a playground for a buffed CoH,

I will say that CoH loses some efficiency on the way to 80. And most of the fights from Naxx at least, generally do not have the same kind of "whole raid takes damage constantly while being totally grouped up" situation that BT and Sunwell have (Sapphiron's aura aside).

I do not pretend to be an expert on shaman, as I haven't levelled mine fully yet. I HAVE dealt with healing and healing assigments before. The shamans in my guild, yes they feel that chain heal isn't as powerful at the moment, but none have really thrown in the towel on the shaman class. I'm pretty optimistic that chain heal and shamans will still be very viable at 80 raiding.

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Q u o t e:
Here's the problem with Wild Growth, GC. You've mentioned that WG is supposed to give Druids a tool to use in small groups (5 or 10 man) where there is no AoE healer present. However, as any hot does, it becomes massively better the more targets you can keep it rolling on. WG is phenomenally good in 25-man raids that are taking consistent damage, but middle of the road in 10-mans and 5-mans. This doesn't quite seem to be what was intended.

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Here's an example WWS:
http://wowwebstats.com/gbqzjebrfhcl1
Obviously WG dominates Felmyst due to the constant aura damage. What concerns me is Twins - using only 20% of my casts on WG (LBx3 tanks, Rejuv a tank, WG raid), I was able to do half as much healing through WG as the CoH priest did while casting CoH almost exclusively. The KJ kill in that parse was sloppy, I think both CoH priests died.

Regarding AoE healing in general, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Unlimited mana pools through potions and SPriests in TBC content meant that heavy AoE damage was necessary to challenge healers. In Lich King, if mana becomes something we have to manage again, hopefully every fight won't need catastrophic levels of AoE damage tacked on in order to keep us busy. If there isn't constant AoE, healers won't constantly be casting AoE heals.

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Q u o t e:

A priest said to us the other day "Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!" He's even thinking of going Disc.

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That's a dire result considering how bad and bloated Disc is in PvE at 80.

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Q u o t e:
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.

Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.

We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest's healing is through CoH. It's a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.

A priest said to us the other day "Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!" He's even thinking of going Disc.

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I'm seeing WG and CoH fill up my heal target long before CH finishes casting...and that's with CH at 2.09 cast time due to haste. I've had to pretty much drop CH in favor of LHW spam at 0.96 so I can even get effective healing. I went from 85% overheal to only 35% on KJ the other day by abandoning CH and going LHW.

If it stays anywhere near what it is now, especially with CoH getting a 6th target through the most ridiculous glyph designed for healers as far as OPness is concerned, I can't ever see any reason to have anyone but CoH priests raid healing.

Ever.

And the issue is simple. CoH heals 5 people a common health amount. CH heals 3 people an uneven amount with the first target usually 35% overheal, the 2nd target getting the right amount, and the 3rd target getting a (usually) trivial heal.

Once you introduce the CH and CoH glyphs you get:

CoH heals 6 people for a common health amount in 1.5 seconds or less
CH heals 4 people in varying amounts with the first heal being largely OH, the 2nd heal good, the 3rd and 4th horribly underpowered. And that is 2.0 seconds or more

Until this dispairity is removed, CoH will always outperform CH with wise placement.

And lets be honest....CoH has a massive heal radius versus CH and you can gurantee who CoH hits.

Oh yeah, don't get me started on the fact that the person CoH targets doesn't even HAVE to get a heal! CH's target MUST get a massive heal, and CoH's target doesn't even always get healed. That's not OP at all.

As a holy priest, I've healed a few level 70 Sunwell plateau with Circle of Healing and a mix of other spells.

Circle of healing is just so boring. It's horrible. I would just target a random person in the raid and it would do all the work. There was absolutely no thinking behind it, but every time I tried some other combination, usually my healing would drop behind the paladins. Surge of light was fun to weave with CoH, but CoH itself was annoying me beyond measure.

I don't want my class to rely on a mindless spell. I would remove it entirely and see if we can buff our other spell to make up for the lost.

(( edit: Eek, first! Omg, Ghostcrawler is up late O.o ))

I may be stabbing my own class in the back here, but I feel that if Circle of Healing isn't overpowered, it's dangerously close to it.

Before 3.0, one of the things I envied about Chain Heal was its intelligent targeting. Since the jumps always targeted the people within range who most needed healing, shaman always good "bang for the buck". In contrast, Circle of Healing only healed party members. This made it extremely effective in some situations, and less effective in others. Depending on the distribution of AOE damage, a lot of CoH's healing could be wasted.

But Circle of Healing has acquired the intelligent targeting that led to the "brain heal" jokes about the shaman spell. I no longer have to choose which group needs topping up more - I can just pick one person who needs healing and let "Circle of EZ-mode" do the rest. And its instant cast too!

On particularly AOE intensive fights (ie most of Sunwell), it feels like around 90% of my healing is Circle of Healing and Surge of Light instant flash heals.

At level 70, the only downside is with current 3.0 mana regen mechanics, it sucks my mana pool dry like a vacuum cleaner.

I love the new mechanic but I'm not sure its balanced. I'd hate to see a cooldown put on it - the selling point of the spells is that its instant cast and spammable, but I wouldn't be devastated if it returned to the original party based healing mechanic. The only issue I see is that the raid wide buff mechanics have meant that raid leaders have stopped worrying about which class goes into which party as much as they used to. It might be hard to convince them to care again just for maximum CoH efficiency.

CoH and WG are superior in that they are much faster. Instant cast, fast ticks, even spread of healing on a lot of targets. A couple CoH priests and resto druids in a raid and a shaman can't finish a chain heal before everyone is back up to full. The raid dmg dps needs to be crazy high before 3 or 4 priests and druids have their aoe heals out dpsed.

could the problem be that essentially healing in a 25 man is about spamming? with 8 healers its not like every healer needs to be able to do everything, generally we fill specialist roles that involve... a lot of spamming one or two things. i don't think its viable to use all our heals in a 25 man raid setting while i do use regrowth/glyphed HT a lot in 5 mans and even 10 mans.

from what i gather dps roles are similar.

atm i notice that most of my healing on a single target is done by lifebloom and rejuv on the tank but biggest chunk of my total healing done is by wild growth across the raid. i'm spamming three things (lifebloom/rejuv on tank and wg on raid) and while its possible it is very mana intensive - i probably need to regem, etc. i can see how it is easier for a druid to just spam wg on the raid, worry less about the mana cost and upkeep of HoT spells on the tank and still pull their weight.

this poses another question - do we need to be healing the tank and the raid at the same time?

edit to bring up lifebloom :) : while i agree that the lifebloom coefficient did scale awfully well, i don't feel that it was really a bad thing that we cast it 70% of the time. its not the nerfed coefficient that has caused some druids to ditch it or what is stopping us from continuing to keep it up on more than one tank in a raid, its the mana cost. with the addition of WG i don't think it would still 'always' be best as a druid to keep lifebloom up on all the tanks or use it on raid.

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Q u o t e:
We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest's healing is through CoH. It's a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.

A priest said to us the other day "Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!" He's even thinking of going Disc.

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Are you talking 80 raiding or 70? Of course at 70 it's pretty strong. As I mentioned, the fights are largely catered around massive aoe damage, and therefor massive aoe healing. It's already been stated such encounters are not going to be commonplace in LK, so I think the value and borderline OP-ness of CoH will falter a bit.

As a sunwell raiding priest, yes I use CoH a lot (I'm the Haste-CoH priest in my raids so it's usually my job), but I still weave in a lot of other heals too. Flash heal is a lot more staple right now, binding heal is still good (especially at higher levels of crit), and Prayer of Mending is never off cooldown. The most interesting thing about CoH with me is the way it procs Surge of Light. It provides a very interesting new aspect to healing.

Every healing class has the one heal that is used more. That's just the way it is. It doesn't always mean that the one heal is an iwin button. I don't want to say that a priest who only uses CoH is lazy, but I think they are limiting themselves.

Also, the price we pay for CoH spam is the rapid, and I mean very rapid, emptying of a mana pool. I had a priest tell me that he would run out of mana 20-30 seconds into the Eredar Twins fight if his guild didn't chain feed him innervates. I myself am sacrificing 6 points from the holy tree so that I can max out mental agility to help somewhat with the mana issues.

I agree CoH is very strong in our world of nerfed Sunwell, where the aoe damage flows freely. However, I don't think this situation is an accurate judgement of how the spell will ultimately be.

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Q u o t e:
I love the new mechanic but I'm not sure its balanced. I'd hate to see a cooldown put on it - the selling point of the spells is that its instant cast and spammable, but I wouldn't be devastated if it returned to the original party based healing mechanic. The only issue I see is that the raid wide buff mechanics have meant that raid leaders have stopped worrying about which class goes into which party as much as they used to. It might be hard to convince them to care again just for maximum CoH efficiency.

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I don't really think this is a good idea. All it means is an extra annoyance of having to arrange groups perfectly each fight, it doesn't really nerf the throughput of the spell (aside from the 6th target glyph).

I'd have to go with simply stop making so many fights with light to medium raid dmg to many targets. Make high dmg to 2-3 targets more common, stressing single target heals.

Ex.: instead of random aoe doing 2500 dmg to 10 people, have it do 5-8k to 2-3 targets. (lvl 70ish numbers)

The spells (wg and coh) don't need a nerf if they situations where they are insanely optimal didn't seem to be the vast majority of the fight designs.

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Q u o t e:
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.

Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.

We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest's healing is through CoH. It's a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern.

A priest said to us the other day "Please nerf Circle of Healing so I can push another button!" He's even thinking of going Disc.

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How are druids becoming single button healers from WG? They still cast tons of spells. If they're casting a giant % WG they're doing something very very wrong.

Also I'm confused by your statement of: "Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place."

Do you mean it's ironic because you think paladins now press more buttons than priests or druids? Because that would mean you haven't ever played one.

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Q u o t e:


How are druids becoming single button healers from WG? They still cast tons of spells. If they're casting a giant % WG they're doing something very very wrong.

Also I'm confused by your statement of: "Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place."

Do you mean it's ironic because you think paladins now press more buttons than priests or druids? Because that would mean you haven't ever played one.

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I just finished an Illidan kill where the #1 healer was a resto druid. All the other healers were shamans and paladins. The druid's healing breakdown? 91% wild growth.

I don't want to be a one-button healer either, but your raid design, especially in SWP, is so AoE damage heavy that nothing else makes sense. Spamming CoH isn't much fun, but if you take that away, having to spam flash heal / binding heal is just going to make us second rate pallies like in Karazhan.

This needs to be addressed in raid design, not by spell nerfs.

I think that CoH and WG are overpowered because they A) Do not cost enough mana, and B) Are far too easy to use with their new intelligent raidwide healing capabilities. The result is that it's very, very possible to just pick random people in the raid and spam WG or CoH and accomplish a lot of healing (if you use WG or CoH on someone who is at full health, the spell even picks someone else to heal - it's literally almost impossible to screw up.) I feel like their mana costs are balanced under the assumption that most of the time, they won't be healing all 5 or 6 possible targets, but with the new raidwide smart healing, they almost always do hit 5 or 6 targets. I think that either their mana costs need to be increased significantly, or they need to return to CoH's former targeting mechanics.

I do think that WG is a bit less overpowered than CoH, though, simply because it almost never completes its healing potential. I think that WG just costs a bit too little mana.

I won't lie, I've liked finally being able to feel productive as a raid healer in Sunwell -- before, my choices were either to roll hots on a tank, or to throw lots of lifeblooms out at random, and occasionally toss a ton of regrowths out if things were going badly. And to stare bitterly at chain heal numbers ( <3 ). These last few weeks have really upped my fun level as a druid healer.

From my perspective, what's interesting now is that I'm totally able to run myself out of mana now between wild growth and gift of the earthmother -- i can just cast more, and that turned the balance away from my previous ability to indefinitely cast lifeblooms on every GCD. So now I'm actually doing something I've never done as a druid -- thinking about how to get out of the five second rule.

I mean, seriously, it's just never ever been an issue before. But I feel like I've got good tools now to make sure I've got enough hots out there to keep things stable while I chill out and let my mana regen fully kick in, and that's actually pretty interesting. I also like making the decision between using rejuv -- higher cost, but also glyphed to do more healing on someone who's low, or lifebloom -- lower cost but later payoff.

That being said, it's possible wild growth is a little too cheap for what it does. Right now it's 5 lifeblooms for the cost of 2. And I can still cast it pretty regularly in the middle of any of the Sunwell aoe encounters. But, like I said, I do tend to actually go to all three of lifebloom, rejuv, and wild growth now, and that's a nice change up.

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Q u o t e:
From what I've been seeing and hearing they're performing far better in Sunwell and BT. Is the supposed AoE healing class being out healed by the HoT and all-around healers? Why? What changes should be made?

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1. Priests are not all around healers anymore. Downranking and spirit nerf hit holy priest single target healing hard. Holy priests will be aoe healers and disc will be single target healers.

2. Shamans are not an aoe healer class, shamans are a utility/support class, while priests are master of healing.

3. You're judging CH vs CoH looking at nerfed obsolete level 70 content, while the changes for WotLK are made for level 80 balance.

4. troll baby troll

Partially in answer to GC's post in another thread, I love the way Resto is working now. I feel we have a great thing going. The only problem is that (as GC said) we're being eclipsed by insta-smart heals like WG/CoH. I hate to call for the nerf of another class. My best friend is a CoH priest in Sunwell who's having the time of his life. I'm not asking for changes out of spite. But even he agrees that Druid and Priests have taken over the Shaman role of AoE healing. I'm not saying that I wouldn't mind some buffs (AA to proc of CH crit plz), but in all honestly that's probably not the solution.